Analyse Your Web Server in 10 Minutes - page 3

Introduction

August 23, 1999

By
James Andrews

That's your ten minutes up! You should now have things set up to be able to get basic information, updated daily, about how your web server performs. But there are always other little tweaks you can try.

If you have more time

If the cron job is mailing you each time it runs saying it cannot run a "referrer report" and you want a list of which other sites are linking to you, then you will need to edit your http.conf file to make sure that referrer data is being generated.

If you read the excellent analog docs and start adding features, or more likely trimming the data in the report, then here are a few tips. First there is an option -settings to dump analog's state. This can be very useful if you have made a typo or picked the wrong options by mistake, as it in effect "reads back" your analog options file. It will also show you the default settings. Another tip: if you use DNS WRITE and a DNSFILE, analog works so fast that experimenting is easy. Once all the DNS information is cached, analog will process more than a megabyte of logfile content per second. So just alter the settings and run it again and again.

Here are some selected further options for analog. MONTHLY OFF, WEEKLY OFF and DAILY OFF turn off the reports that deal with months, weeks and days. If you are running the report every day you might like to ignore this data. REFREPEXCLUDE http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/* means: in the referring URL report ignore all requests from that site. In this case I do not want to see any internal links on Linuxplanet, only the links from outside. FILEEXCLUDE /ads/* ignores the adverts in the stats. As the content editor on Linuxplanet, the hit rates on the adverts is not of much interest to me.

The other ON directives make sure that the reports I do want are on. REFERRER would be off by default.